7/01/2011
5/15/2011
Homage to King
My page in Kramers Ergot #7 was a homage to Frank King, who drew countless beautiful Sunday pages involving flying up and looking down on the landscape below. There are many examples just in the pages reprinted in the Drawn and Quarterly anthologies alone. I went to these to see how to draw the landscape gracefully from up above and was amazed at how many times King had his characters flying on Sunday.
Ganges #3 also is a kind of homage to the "daydreaming" Frank King pages (in both Bobby Make Believe and Gasoline Alley) with some Little Lulu love in the mix. That's how I thought of it, anyhow.
(crossposted to the Balloonist)
3/03/2011
1/30/2011
Advice
For what it's worth--
A young cartoonist emailed me for advice and here's what I wrote back:
...As far as advice, here's some (not having seen your work--I mean, I don't know what kind of comics you're trying to make?): Self publish your work in minicomics you can sell or give to people. Everything that's come my way--jobs, friends, wife--directly or indirectly, has come from the minicomics I've made since high school. Putting stuff on the web is OK but does not substitute for seeing your own work in a booklet. It makes you re-evaluate and get better. Set deadlines, get things finished, and move onto the next thing. Don't get bogged down in some big nebulous project that never gets done--this is a mistake a lot of young cartoonists make. Set modest goals--a 4 page story, then another, then another--and get them done. If they're lame, it's OK, make the next one better. Then put your work in front of other people, and you'll be able to tell if you're getting across.
The most important thing is making pages of comics, and just arrange your life so that you're doing that often, and enjoying it, and before you know it you're a cartoonist, and things will work themselves out sooner or later. They say it takes 10,000 hours (about 10 years) to gather the skills for any complicated line of work. That seems like a lot, but it's not so bad, and you just have to put the time in.
1/08/2011
Latest Focus Book
This was the last "Focus Book" of 2010. It was a pretty rough year of working! Will it every get easier? No, it won't; why do you think it would? No resolutions, or anyways, same old resolutions. Back to work...
10/07/2010
Working on Ganges #4, taking up all of my time.
Above is a picture of the latest finished "Focus Book."
7/21/2010
His Own Comic
Was in Kansas City a couple weeks back and, y'know, I hit all the local bargain bins. Along with the usual First, Continuity, Eclipse, etc. masterpieces I also got some old Comics Journals. I already had this issue (#154, 1993, the legendary Woodring interview!) but I picked it up again because it was cheap and who knows, maybe this particular copy has the answers. I remember reading this issue, sitting in my high school library. O days gone by!
A belated congratulations, Chris!
Here's a page from the Woodring interview, of a rough layout:
7/17/2010
7/13/2010
GTD
This is a doodle/diagram of the Getting Things Done system. It was very helpful to me to work through, because with no day job and few real deadlines, I can get pretty bogged down, anxious and scatterbrained. The basic form of the system is really just standardized common sense: you gather everything together, then sort through it, organize it, and then focus on specifics. It's very useful to analyze and break down a complicated project into discrete steps, and then be aware of what step you're on, and keep your focus there and not get freaked out by what's down the road. I suppose some people are able to do this easily, but I struggle with it.
6/29/2010
Focus Book
For a couple years now, I've been using little mini-comic sized books, made from scrap paper from the copy shop, folded and stapled, to keep focused each day on the day's work. Or to free-write and warm up. This is the latest one, just finished today. I haven't been numbering them, which is unusual for me! I also use the same format to write and take notes for the bigger projects. Now you know, right? What's the lesson here? I don't know. For me, they're less intimidating and overwhelming than sk.books or moleskines, and cheaper, and you get to the end faster. Also, they're conveniently proportional to the proportions of the comics pages I draw. Whatever works.
6/17/2010
What It Is
In 2007, I put together a zine called New Construction #1 because I was having a hard time getting Ganges #2 done, and I thought throwing together a mini-comic of odds and ends would help me get some enthusiasm and confidence back. There were some rightly deleted scenes from Ganges #1, sketchbook exercises, and miscellaneous experiments, like this comic strip. This last strip especially made me think about continuing New Construction as a series where I’d throw together stuff about making comics from my own perspective: a “reflective practitioner” trying to educate myself and keep myself from blocks and funks.
Issue #2 was about thumbnailing and on display were many grimy USS Catastrophe thumbnails.
My plan for issue #3 is for it to be about “Productivity” a subject I've struggled through these last few years, and I have many doodles and notes to show for it. Since there’s no reason really to keep this stuff to myself, I thought I’d put together this blog, and post New Con #1 and 2, along with first drafts of the material that’ll go into New Con #3. And whatever else. I have some ideas, and I have a lot to learn. We’ll see how it goes. This exists to help me with my own work, first of all, but maybe the public display of my slow-witted struggles can help you too. If my *real* work is going well, though, it’ll probably be pretty quiet around here...unlike now...
I’ll keep comments closed, but please write me at kevinh at usscatastrophe with corrections and comments.
6/16/2010
6/15/2010
The Comics Table of Space and Time
“Whoso partakes of a thing enjoys his share, and comes into contact with the thing and its other partakers. But he claims no more. His share in no wise negates the thing or their share; nor does it preclude his possession of reserved and private powers with which they have nothing to do, and which are not all absorbed in the mere function of sharing. Why may not the world be a sort of republican banquet of this sort, where all the qualities of being respect one another's personal sacredness, yet sit at the common table of space and time?”
William James,
On Some Hegelisms
What's mistake but a kind of take?
Nancy, Solidarity, Typography
"One tired jab against Ernie Bushmiller was that he didn’t draw his characters but merely rubber-stamped them on the page...
"...if “iconic solidarity” is a formalist property common to comics in general, what Bushmiller is up to is heightening this formal property by making it as blunt and visible as possible. In effect, Bushmiller’s gambit is to make us aware as possible that we’re reading a comic by taking a key formal property and making it part of the narrative itself. Hence all those twins and mirror images. This might explain why so many comics aficionados have a special regard for Nancy, which often seems to be the very beating heart, the very distilled essence, of comics itself (for those who still believe, of course, in essences)."
I don’t think “iconic solidarity” means the same thing as the rubber stamp. I think it has less to do with regimentation and uniformity, and more to do with interdependence. (The political language is maybe interesting?) But I’m not sure about that. I gave up on trying to figure out Groensteen for now.
The twinning is a great catch, though. Drawing Nancy and Sluggo almost exactly the same each time, it’s like he’s making them into a font, like he’s writing “Nancy” in Helvetica. All the drawings of Nancy are transparently Nancy the way a commonly used font will make a word "transparent." But I think saying that Bushmiller represents the “distilled essence” of comics is like saying Helvetica is the essence of the written alphabet. (What about Giddyup?) It’s no knock on Bushmiller or Helvetica, but it helps to relativize the situation, to talk in terms of use, function, and keep from away from essence-talk. If cartooning is a kind of handwriting, I'd rather say something like Bushmiller had handwriting that was beautiful, super-consistent and easy-to-read.
Nancy gets meta, like "Helvetica" written in Helvetica.
Getting a variety of letters and pictures and marks to work together, in solidarity, that's the trick. It doesn't have to be clean and easy. Everyone doesn't have to wear uniforms and stand in line. It makes it easier to do a daily strip. It's easier to read. The “rubber stamp” school of cartooning—where images and pages are handled like typography—is something I have an affinity for, but I’m suspicious of claiming too much for it.
I don't know why my brain gets so hung up on this. I'm still thinking it through. I hope I'm not being pedantic. Maybe it's as simple as wanting to keep clear the distinction between description and prescription.
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